


from the dregs

by gingerslapNotion



Category: Promare (2019)
Genre: Found Family, Gen, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Movie Spoilers, Pre-Canon, ignis divorce indulgence, lots of headcanons, slight emeto warning?, thats why his last name is 'ex' its becus he's an epic divorce man
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-09-23
Packaged: 2020-10-26 15:38:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20744594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gingerslapNotion/pseuds/gingerslapNotion
Summary: “Hey, Ignis…” she began, staring at the ground, petting Vinny who had curled himself up in her hands with a thumb, “Was it always like this?”Ignis was silent for a moment, his expression unreadable to Lucia.“No… no, it wasn’t. It was bad, but never like this.”





	from the dregs

**Author's Note:**

> working title: lucia loves her divorced gay dad
> 
> i need to get my "gay divorcee ignis accidentally adopts feral lesbian lucia" headcanon out there while the hype train is still going full throttle please enjoy

One thing that could be said about the Foresight Foundation Youth Housing Unit M was that it was never a boring place to stay. As Lucia sat on her cot in the tiny room she shared with three other teens, Vinny napping beside her leg, she found her focus torn from her tinkering by loud music blasting from downstairs and an argument going on in the hallway.

Disputes were a frequent occurrence in the little house on the outskirts of Promepolis. All the residents were under enormous stress as most of them had nowhere else to go, no homes to return to, and the small space could barely accommodate them all, so it was only natural frustrations would be taken out on each other. Kids would fight for food and toiletries, bathroom time, better cots and bedding, practically anything. On top of it all, there was always a shortage of volunteers to help out resolving issues like these or making sure there was enough supplies in stock so the residents wouldn’t have to fight for resources in the first place. 

However, these squabbles were petty in comparison to the fights that broke out regarding the Burnish threat. Nearly all of the kids in the house had been placed there by the Foresight Foundation after Burnish-related incidents leaving them without families. A majority of the residents had either lost their homes in attacks or had been abandoned by Burnish parents, and these residents naturally had reason to despise the Burnish. However, there were also quite a few kids who had witnessed first-hand their families being taken away by Freeze Force, and they as such were far more sympathetic to the plight of their loved ones and those like them. This all made for a very tense atmosphere in the house even on a good day. The two factions mostly kept to themselves within the space, and everyone did their best to avoid the subject, but every time there was a new attack somewhere in the city another fight would inevitably break out.

Thankfully, it didn’t sound as though the fight in the hallway was one of these. While Lucia herself had come to find herself living in the house for reasons completely unrelated to the Burnish, she found arguments about dirty towels or stolen candy bars much easier to tune out. Frankly, if Lucia had to describe her attitude towards the Burnish, it would be curiosity more than anything. Practically everyone had an opinion on how best to deal with the fire-wielding mutants, but no one seemed interested in understanding how the phenomenon had come to be in the first place - not since Professor Prometh, anyway, and he’d been missing for years now. To be honest, Lucia found it a little odd. It wasn’t as though she could do anything about it, though; she was just a homeless kid. For now, she just concerned herself with surviving another day - which currently required figuring out how to fix the stabilizer on this damn drone.

Just then, one of Lucia’s roommates showed up, sidestepping the arguing residents in the hallway and closing the door behind him, the sound of it causing Vinny to wake up from his nap with an indignant squeak.

“I’m back,” he said, tossing his beat-up backpack onto his own cot across the room from Lucia’s.

“Hey Amit,” she sighed, moving the drone off her cot to make room for him to sit beside her. “Whatcha got for me?”

Lucia really liked Amit. In fact, he was probably her only friend in the world besides Vinny. He was a couple years her junior (fourteen while she was seventeen), and on the quiet side, which Lucia appreciated. He was one of those whose parents had been captured by Freeze Force, but the fights about Burnish only made his anxiety flare up. They’d first become friends when she noticed him huddled in a corner during a particularly bad fight in the common room (like, chairs-being-thrown-level bad) and had helped him escape to her room for some privacy and quiet. After that, she had convinced the volunteer on duty at the time to move him to her room (at the protest of several other residents, not that she cared - she could take care of herself).

Amit rummaged through his bag, pulling out what looked to be tech junk and dumping it on the cot. He also produced a plastic shopping bag and a few old books. He left the books on his cot, grabbing a Slim Jim out of the plastic bag and taking it and the junk over to Lucia’s side of the room. He gave the Slim Jim to Vinny (who immediately set about gnawing the plastic open with his teeth) and sat down next to Lucia, handing her a busted alarm clock.

“What do you think of this?” He asked. Lucia turned the clock over in her hands, then grabbed a screwdriver from under her bed to pry it open and get a look at the inside. It looked as though the clock had been jostled causing the power supply to be disconnected internally from the rest of the circuitry; whoever had thrown it away hadn’t even bothered to look into getting it repaired, because if they had they would’ve found it was ridiculously easy to fix. Lucia was always amazed at how wasteful some people could be.

“Oh yeah, we could get fifty for this, easy,” she said, setting it down on the floor. “Anything else good?”

“This, maybe?” He said with uncertainty, handing her an incredibly old-looking game console. When she opened it up, she found the circuit board was completely fried. She shook her head.

“Only if someone else throws out the exact same model with everything busted _ but _ the circuitry. Shame… might as well save it though, you never know,” she put it on the floor next to the clock.

This was how they survived - Amit would go scrounging for e-waste and Lucia would fix it up and sell it. They’d made enough cash this way to supplement the resources provided by the Foundation and keep from going hungry, and even had a little left over to buy things like used books and old video games to keep them from going stir crazy in the house. It wasn’t perfect, but it was what worked.

Lucia had dreams of course, dreams of going to college, of becoming an inventor and using her creations to help people rather than make money and gain notoriety like a certain governor. Those dreams were far off though - Lucia hadn’t even graduated high school yet when she ran away from home, so she would need to get her GED before she could even start applying to colleges. And then of course, there was the matter of tuition. Lucia saved some of what she made from each repair job she did in an empty hard candy tin, but it was slow going. She had to admit, her situation was more than a little disheartening. She refused to lose hope though - she was stubborn and smart and she knew it. It was that which kept her going. Well, that and Amit, and Vinny of course. 

“Finished!” she announced to the room, holding up the repaired drone. Just as she did, however, a shout came from the first floor common room and several people ran thundering through the hallway outside the door and down the stairs.

“What is it now?” she asked with exasperation, getting up from her cot and heading to the door. Amit followed close behind with Vinny on his shoulder.

“There’s been another raid,” said a kid named Kuzon as he came back up the stairs, running a hand through his hair with a pained expression on his face. Someone downstairs cranked the volume on the television up and they heard a news announcer say-

“- hideout secured by Freeze Force just hours ago and all Burnish insurgents captured.” Several of the residents cheered at this, causing Lucia’s stomach to turn with discomfort. “Citizens of Promepolis are warned to stay safe and to report any suspicious behavior, as there may be retaliatory attacks from Mad Burnish terrorists still at large.”

“This can be seen as nothing but an absolute win,” said Kray Foresight’s voice, echoing as though making an announcement to a large outdoor crowd. “We still have a long way to go before the Burnish threat is driven out entirely, but today’s actions by Freeze Force are a monumental step towards bringing peace and safety to Promepolis and to the world.”

“I- I need to lie down,” said Amit quietly, turning to head back to his cot. Lucia followed behind him, moving his bag and books to the ground. He lay down on top of the blankets, legs folded up to his torso, Vinny curling himself against his chest. Lucia sat down beside him. She offered no words of reassurance, because she had none. What could she even say to make this better? Instead she sighed and rubbed his back, comforting him as best she could until he fell asleep, his face still tight with worry.

* * *

Lucia awoke to Vinny squeaking at her and pounding his tiny rat claws on her face.

“Mmgh… _ whaaaat _…” she whined, refusing to open her eyes. After Amit had fallen asleep she had gone back to working on repairs and then played Undertale for an hour or two before falling asleep as well. It must be the middle of the night now, she thought, what on earth did Vinny want? He seemed insistent, concerned even. And then she noticed it - the smell of smoke.

She immediately opened her eyes and sat up to find the whole opposite side of the room engulfed in bright pink and green flames. She looked over to Amit’s cot - he was gone. Hopefully that meant he was safe.

“Shit. C’mon Vinny, let’s get out of here,” she said, lifting him up to her shoulder. Having been born after the Great World Blaze, she had been doing fire drills for as long as she could remember, and the steps came like second nature to her. She grabbed her water bottle from the bedside table and wet a spare shirt before holding it up to her face, then headed to the door, leaving her belongings behind. She tested the door knob and found it warm to the touch, but not impossible to hold, so she turned it and went out into the hallway, closing the door behind her.

There was more fire in the hallway, but not so much that she couldn’t navigate her way through. However, the stairs to the first floor were completely ablaze. She thought for a moment, then decided to head to the bathroom at the end of the hall - she could possibly use the shower curtain and towels as a rope to escape through the window, and if not there were shrubs on the side of the house that could help break her fall. She ran down the hallway, briefly wondering why there seemed to be no other residents trying to escape. Why had she been left behind?

Suddenly, the ceiling gave out and came crashing down ahead of her, blocking the escape she had planned. Quickly, she turned into a bedroom instead. The room hadn’t caught much yet, though Burnish flames were far stronger and faster-spreading than ordinary fire, and she could already see one wall beginning to char and smoke as the blaze burned on the other side. She grabbed the blankets from off the two cots in the room and quickly tied them together in the knot she’d been practicing her whole life.

But as she went to tie one end of her makeshift rope to something secure in the room, the blaze suddenly burst through the from the other room, spreading quickly along the walls until Lucia was caught in a ring of fire. The flames ate up her rope in a flash, burning all the way up to where she held one end in her hand. She screamed and shook her arm, putting the flames out and leaving her hand angry and red and very, very much in pain. As she wrapped it in the wet shirt, she looked towards the window, only to find that it too was on fire, the latch melted shut. She was out of options.

Vinny squeaked sadly as tears began to roll down Lucia’s cheeks. She collapsed on the floor, the heat and smoke and exertion finally taking its toll on her body.

“Vinny… you can probably still get out…” She breathed softly. But Vinny only shook his head, curling himself up against her chest, which only served to make Lucia cry harder. She lay there on the floor, the air around her growing warmer and becoming harder to breathe, until finally she passed out.

* * *

_ The sound of a door being slammed open, the sound of gunfire. Heat turning to sudden cold. Someone shouting, strong arms lifting her and carrying her away. And then, fresh air. _Lucia briefly opens her eyes to see smoke trailing into the clear night sky.

* * *

Lucia awoke with a start on the pavement. She had an oxygen mask strapped to her face and her hand had been bandaged. She sat up and noticed she had someone else’s jacket draped around her shoulders - red with yellow stripes. Burning Rescue.

“Hey, kid, take it easy-” said a gruff voice, footsteps running up behind her. Suddenly the person to whom the footsteps and voice belonged to came into view. Blond hair, tan skin, a mustache. Bare arms covered in tattoos. Steady blue eyes. He knelt down in front of Lucia, putting a large, strong hand on her shoulder. “You inhaled a lot of smoke. You need to rest, don’t exert yourself too much.”

“Where’s-” Lucia began, but was interrupted by the very thing she was about to ask about.

“_Vinnyvinnyvinny! _” he came running up to her, racing up onto her shoulder and nuzzling her cheek with his face.

“Your little rat there lead us to you, you know,” the man told Lucia, “We thought everyone had evacuated before we arrived, but he was going crazy out on the lawn. Some kids told us he belonged to you.”

Lucia smiled, giving Vinny a scratch on his little head with her finger.

“What even happened?” she asked the man. “Was it an attack?”

“Hardly,” he told her, “One of the residents-”

“_IGNIS! _”

He was interrupted by a booming voice from behind Lucia. His eyes narrowed and he stood up, crossing his arms. Lucia turned to see a huge hulking man in Freeze Force armor standing before the smoldering wreck of the house, staring down her rescuer, Ignis, with a nasty smile. Slung over his shoulder was a body in ice cuffs, their face hidden from sight.

“Vulcan,” Ignis said in a measured tone, though Lucia noticed the clench of his jaw and the bulging vein in his forehead. “It’s been a while.”

“That’s _ Lieutenant Colonel _ Vulcan to you, little man,” he said, his smile growing into a spiteful grin, revealing unnaturally sharp teeth. “Unlike you, _ I _ keep moving up in the world! It turns out your _ friend _ Kray likes my style. We have similar ideas about you, in fact. You’re gonna be stuck doing your little useless rescue missions forever while I rise to the top of Freeze Force! Regretting your choices now, _ Vice Captain? _”

“I will never regret picking Burning Rescue over joining you and your brutes, Vulcan. That’s a promise,” Ignis replied, voice raised but still remaining collected.

“_I__ told you it’s Lieutenant Colonel! _” Vulcan shouted, taking a step towards Ignis, causing the ground to shake under the weight of his armor. Before he could go any further, however, another Freeze Force member put a hand on his shoulder and nodded their head towards the tanks. Vulcan straightened, tilting his chin up to look at Ignis down his nose.

“We’ll be going now. Thanks _ so much _ for all your _ invaluable _ help!” Vulcan said with a sneer and a flick of his tongue, before turning and heading in the direction of the vehicles. And then Lucia saw it - the face of the captured Burnish.

It was Amit.

“That bastard - hey, are you okay?” Ignis asked, kneeling back down in front of Lucia, who had gone pale, her face blank. Knots kept twisting and untwisting in her stomach. Amit had become Burnish and it caused the house to catch fire. That’s why Lucia had been left alone to fend for herself - their room had been the epicenter of the fire. And now Amit was being taken away by Freeze Force. She would probably never see him again. Would he even survive in a Burnish prison? All these thoughts swirled in her head, and she quickly crawled to the edge of the sidewalk, ripped off the oxygen mask, and threw up in the gutter. Ignis patted her back and held her hair out of her face as she coughed up her dinner, two Slim Jims and a chocolate bar. When she was done, he handed her a water bottle, which she drank from gratefully. Finally, she spoke, voice hoarse-

“That Burnish… he was my friend.”

Ignis sighed and rubbed her back, hanging his head.

“I’m sorry, kid.”

They sat on the curb beside each other for a while. Lucia looked around at all the other residents like herself who once again had no home to go to. Volunteers from the Foresight Foundation had arrived at that point, though they were severely understaffed given it was the middle of the night. They had begun splitting the teens into groups to take to other housing units. Lucia was certain all the others were just as crowded as Unit M had been, and now would be even more so with the addition of new residents. She looked back at the wreckage of her former home.

“Hey, Ignis…” she began, staring at the ground, petting Vinny who had curled himself up in her hands with a thumb, “Was it always like this?”

Ignis was silent for a moment, his expression unreadable to Lucia.

“No… no, it wasn’t. It was bad, but never like this.”

They went back to silence, until a young woman with long blonde hair in a Burning Rescue uniform walked up to Ignis.

“Boss, we should get going. The Foundation will take it from here.”

“Yeah… yeah, alright. Go find Remi and Varys and get the truck loaded up, we’ll head out in five.”

The young woman nodded and left. Ignis slapped his hands on his knees and slowly stood up. He looked back down at Lucia on the curb.

“You gonna be okay…?”

“Lucia.” she told him.

“Lucia?”

She shrugged.

“I don’t know. I’ve survived before.” It was the best answer she could offer. She took off the jacket and handed it up to him, but he pushed it back towards her.

“You keep it. You need it more than I do.” With that, he began walking back towards his car.

“Ignis!” Lucia called after him. He turned back to her. “Thanks. For saving me.”

He answered with a silent wave of his hand, then got in his car and drove off, the enormous Burning Rescue truck following slowly behind. Lucia watched as they departed, until they turned at the end of the street and disappeared from sight.

She wondered what she was going to do now.

* * *

Ignis awoke at five every morning. As Vice Captain, it was his job to get Burning Rescue up and running for the day, which meant he had to be awake before anyone else. He dragged himself out of bed, cracked his back, and headed to the shared bathroom to brush his teeth and shower. As he did, he perseverated once again on his concerns about how the department was being run. Captain Vaucus was too old to be going on actual missions and was useless in practically every other aspect of the day-to-day challenge of running Burning Rescue. He should’ve retired years ago, yet Kray let him keep his position, god knows why.

Actually, Ignis had a hunch that Kray only kept Vaucus around solely to spite him. Ignis was essentially doing all the duties of a Captain without being allowed to actually advance to a position where he could change anything. Kray was just trying to keep him in check while also making him work his ass off, and it was infuriating. Ignis had never pegged Kray as the type to be so petty when they had been dating, but people changed, he supposed. Kray certainly had.

Vulcan, however - Vulcan was _ definitely _ the type of person to bring his personal issues into the workplace. He’d always been like that, Ignis thought as he shampooed his hair, even when they’d had been working side by side as Burning Rescue rookies. Ignis hadn’t minded it then, he’d even found it strangely endearing at times to watch him get worked up at slights coworkers made about his height, but being on the receiving end of Vulcan’s spite was a much different story. Now the two of them were apparently conspiring to make Ignis’ job even harder. Just what he needed - two of his exes working together to make his life a living hell.

Kray wouldn’t even authorize hiring more squad members, despite the department being short a mechanic and a pilot, saying money was too tight right now - which was complete bullshit, Ignis had seen the brand new armor and tanks Freeze Force had brought to the burning youth house the other day, all to capture a single Burnish kid who couldn’t have been more than fifteen. Vulcan had just been showing off, that asshole.

So between the Captain being useless and the squad being short two members, there were essentially only four active members of Burning Rescue Squad 3. Add to that the fact that Remi and Linda were both still relatively new and needed a lot of guidance, and it was a miracle Ignis hadn’t yet burned out. He sighed as he dried off his hair, draping the towel around his neck and staring at his reflection in the mirror. He was only 39, but his eyes looked older than that, weary from stress and overwork. He’d joined Burning Rescue because he wanted to help people - how had it ended up like this?

Ignis was disturbed from his navel-gazing by Varys’ alarm clock going off in the sleeping quarters, indicating he had to get a move on if he wanted to get first crack at the weights in the common room. He pulled on a white tank and gym shorts and headed downstairs, turning on the coffee machine in the kitchen area before heading to the racks of weights. But suddenly, he stopped short - there was someone sleeping on the couch. And as he got closer, he realized he recognized the figure - it was the girl he’d saved in the house fire the other day. Lucia.

How had she gotten in? Ignis was certain he’d locked up last night. He sat down beside her on the couch, and as he did, her little pet rat squirmed his way out from between the folds of the jacket he’d apparently been sleeping in and made his way over to sit on Ignis’ knee. What was she even doing sleeping here of all places? Surely she’d been moved to a different housing unit by the Foundation.

Not that it was much better than sneaking into Burning Rescue HQ - Ignis had heard the stories about how terrible the Foresight Foundation’s youth housing really was. A dearth of volunteers, hardly any funds put towards improving living conditions, basically leaving a bunch of displaced teens to fend for themselves. It was pretty hypocritical to build an entire reputation based upon saving one kid from a Burnish attack, yet leave innumerable others to struggle on their own. Just another way in which Kray had changed, Ignis thought with a sigh. A single orphan was a tragedy, but thousands of them was just a statistic.

He remembered what Lucia had asked him that night - _ was it always like this? _

Ignis had been fifteen when the Burnish first began to appear. But even at that age, he’d already seen how cruel the world could be, even without fire-wielding mutants to fan the flames of discord. He’d seen his classmates bullied and beaten up for being openly gay or trans, friends of his kicked out by their parents for their orientation or gender expression. LGBT youth housing just as underfunded as the Foresight Foundation’s was today. He’d done everything he could to avoid becoming one of them, but it hadn’t worked. He too had ended up on the streets, disowned by his mother and stepfather, surfing from couch to couch just to keep a roof over his head. Part of a statistic.

No, the world hadn’t always been quite this dangerous to live in, but it had always been hard.

Ignis scratched the rat on its little head, causing it to let out a happy squeak. He stared at Lucia - even in her sleep, she wore an expression of concern. He took note of the rainbow-striped ring on her left middle finger. Then he noticed the jacket she was clutching - red with yellow stripes.

She’d been trying to return his jacket.

Ignis stood up and carefully removed the jacket from her arms, before pulling an old quilt over her body and tucking a few strands of hair out of her face behind her ear. The rat crawled underneath the quilt and disappeared from sight, and in her sleep Lucia smiled.

It _ was _ hard, Ignis thought. But there was good in the world too. Sometimes one just had to become it.

**Author's Note:**

> "from the dregs" is what u get when u translate "ex fex" from latin
> 
> find me on twitter @killiakill


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